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“Hi, we’re Tony and Helen, and we’re here to help…”

If you’re thinking of taking a vacation in Europe, you’ve come to the right place.

“Travelsignposts” has been designed to help people just like you who are thinking of visiting Europe – either on your own, touring by coach or river cruise, or in a mixture of different ways – decide where you want to go.

Who are the people behind Travelsignposts?

The owners of Travelsignposts are professional photographer and writer Tony Page and his prolific blogger wife, Helen. She’s the pretty one and he’s the one on the left.

We hope our website is going to be useful to you. We’ve tried to make it the kind of place Helen and I would have liked to find when we began touring Europe. In the years since then we’ve enjoyed all kinds of travel, from coach tours and river cruises to walking holidays and independent exploring. We’ve taken tens of thousands of photographs, and – mostly Helen – have written getting on for a couple of thousand posts.

Travelling in style without breaking the bank

I’ve been travelling the world for work and pleasure for most of my life (I started off leading expedition tours across Africa too long ago to mention), but when Helen and I first got married we had to face the problem of her having limited vacation time at her job – a bit of a shock to someone like me who was used to more or less setting his own schedule!

At first we were against the idea of organised tours, as they seemed too regimented, but we wanted to pack as much into Helen’s precious vacation time as possible, without breaking the bank. That was how we eventually came to take our first short coach tour in Italy. To our surprise we found that it was not only cost-effective but enabled us to do an amazing variety of things that would simply have been impossible to fit in if we’d have been travelling on our own. River cruises are another option we’ve found that offers similar advantages.

Helen taking it easy at the Eiffel Tower

Experience more of Europe for your money

Of course, there are trade-offs. Not many funky hotels, for example. But with careful scrutiny of the various itineraries, reading between the lines of the brochures, the right research and a get-up-and-go attitude on the road, we believe these kind of tours can offer a great opportunity to see and experience more of Europe for your money than is otherwise possible. You’ll make friends, too!

Still, there’s no substitute for slow, independent travel, and we hope our site will encourage you to explore not only the great cities but also lesser known places in Europe. And by combining a tour with time on your own, you can get the best of both worlds!

About the photographs…

Ice-cream at San Gimignano, even in the rain!

Our main aim in putting together this site has been to give you a realistic view of the various destinations. This means if the skies were grey and it was raining, that’s what you see – believe it or not, the skies are not always blue in Europe, in spite of the travel brochures!

We’ve kept the images relatively small so that they don’t take too long to load, most are around 600 pixels wide or high; a few years ago download speeds were slower, so some of the older photos are smaller, but we’re slowly replacing those. In fact some of the older shots were taken on film, although of course now everything is digital, and all images are available for commercial stock usage on request (the originals look a LOT better!).

There’s more to come:

In the future we will be adding more photographs and more destinations to Travelsignposts, but to start with we have concentrated on the more popular destinations in Europe. Our Europe River Cruise Guide has proved popular and our expanded France photo albums and destination info is now online, now being followed by comprehensive coverage of the UK, Ireland and Germany. The Venice City Guide, the Paris City Guide and the London City Guide are now up and running, and these are being followed by guides to Brussels and other major cities.

We are also building an extensive database of useful links and travel information, so if you have any suggestions, please send them in…